All parents want their children to do a little better than they've done. A little better education. A little more saved. But today, too many people think that American Dream is a pipe dream.

America's working families say they are falling behind, even as those at the very top of the economic heap make out like bandits. Wages, health care costs and retirement security are all trouble areas. America's once-powerful middle class is shrinking.

One of the primary reasons working people are getting left behind is they've lost their ability to bargain with their employer for better wages and benefits through unions. Unions are a cornerstone to building and keeping a strong middle class in our nation.

Union workers earn on average 30 percent more than workers who don't have a union, according to government statistics, and they are much more likely to have health care and pensions. In fact, more than half of workers who don't already have a union say they'd join one tomorrow if given the chance. But too few are getting that chance.

Employers routinely intimidate, harass, coerce and even fire people who try to improve their lives through unions, and our laws are helpless to stop them.

Since 2000, about one-fifth of union activists who tried to form a union were fired, according to a study by the nonpartisan Center for Economic and Policy Research. Employers routinely threaten workers with loss of pay and benefits if they form a union. Seventy-eight percent of private sector employers require supervisors to meet one-on-one with employees they directly supervise, urging them to vote against the union.

At a recent New Hampshire House Labor Committee hearing, Gilmanton Iron Works resident Victor Bota described the tactics used during a union organizing drive where he worked. When Bota and his coworkers decided to form a union to bargain for a better life, the company held mandatory meetings to talk about why the union would not represent them and called in union supporters for intimidating one-on-one meetings to pressure them to vote against the union.

Bota explained he was intimidated by the effort saying, "I like to eat. . . . I have a family to support. . . . . I was thinking I might not have a job there."

In Bota's case, he and his coworkers ultimately won the right to for a union. Too often, however, these intimidating and coercive tactics have their intended effect.

The National Labor Relations Act was designed to protect employee choice on whether to form unions, but it has been turned upside down. The current system is not like any democratic election held anywhere else in our society. Employers delay elections, using the opportunity to persuade employees to vote against the union. By the time employees vote in a National Labor Relations Board election, the environment has been so poisoned that a free and fair choice isn't even an option.

A bill in Congress would go a long way to leveling the playing field between management and employees and toward putting the choice to form a union back into employees' hands. The Employee Free Choice Act would establish "majority sign-up," which says that employees can have union representation at a company if a majority of the employees indicate in writing that they want one.

Majority sign-up is not a new approach. For years, responsible employers such as Cingular Wireless have taken a position of allowing employees to choose, by majority decision, whether to have a union. Those companies have found that majority sign-up is an effective way to gauge workers' choice - and it results in less hostility and polarization in the workplace than the failed labor relations board process. (next page »)